Genuine Burial Shroud of Jesus Found
When you see the Shroud of Turin, you are seeing a kind of supernatural photograph of Jesus, taken by God 2,000 years ago, as he lay in the tomb after his death by crucifixion. It undoubtedly happened at the moment of His resurrection.
1. THE IMAGE IS OF A CRUCIFIED MAN. The image on the shroud is of a man who’s been whipped and beaten, crowned with thorns, etc. Imprints of nails are through the wrists and feet. The right side of the man's chest was pierced and marks of whip lashes are on the back. The man's right shoulder is chafed, as if from having borne a rough, heavy object. A number of puncture wounds appear around the head, and one cheek displays a pronounced bruise. The chest cavity is expanded, from strained breathing – a common finding of crucifixion victims. All of these match the description of Christ and His suffering.
2. GENUINE 1ST CENTURY FABRIC. Textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg says the cloth in its weave corresponds to a fabric found at the fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea, which dated to the 1st century.
3. 3-D CORRECT. In 1976 Pete Schumacher, John Jackson and Eric Jumper analyzed a photograph of the shroud image using a VP8 Image Analyzer, which was developed for NASA to create brightness maps of the moon. They found that, unlike any photograph they had analyzed, the shroud image has the property of decoding into a 3-dimensional image.
4. DIRT. The feet of the man of the shroud bears smudges of actual dirt that contain travertine aronite, a rare form of calcium found in caves near Jerusalem's Damascus Gate. No other source is known.
5. OPTICS. One oddity of the shroud image is that it can be seen only in an optimum viewing distance of six to 15 feet. Closer or farther and the image fades out of view. If a supposed hoaxer painted the man on the shroud, as some have said, did he do it by holding a six-foot brush at arm's length?
6. POLLENS ON THE CLOTH. The 70 varieties of pollen found on the burial cloth come from the Near East and 38 varieties come from within 50 miles of Jerusalem—and 14 of them grow nowhere else. This confirms the shroud originated in Palestine.
7. HISTORICAL BACKDROP. Ian Wilson [The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?] tells how this shroud, from 33 C.E. to 1204 C.E., resided at Edessa (the "Face of Edessa") and later at Constantinople, under the protection of the Byzantine Emperors. Just before the sack of Constantinople in 1204, it was taken to the regions of the European Crusaders. Around 1353, a French knight named Geoffroi de Charny returned with the shroud to Lirey, France. In 1345 he had joined the crusade of Humbert II, the “Campaign of Smyrna.” It’s thought he acquired the shroud there. The shroud was later in a fire in Chambéry, France in 1532. The Savoys acquired it and in 1578 moved it to Turin, Italy, where it’s resided ever since.
8. NOT THE WORK OF A FORGER. THE 1978 U.S.-led Shroud of Turin Research Project found no sign of artificial pigments. “The Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist,” the project’s 1981 report declared. “The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin and also give a positive test for serum albumin.” Elvio Carlino, a researcher at the Institute of Crystallography in Bari, Italy, writes that the blood has high levels of substances called creatinine and ferritin, found in patients who suffer forceful multiple traumas like torture.
9. THE CARBON-14 BOMBSHELL. So it was a shocker in 1988 when 3 labs (University of Oxford, University of Arizona, and the Swiss FIT) all set the shroud’s age at from 1260 and 1390. They stated it was “conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval,” thus meaning, a forgery. Since then, four studies have overturned their dates: a. Chemistry Today (Vol 26. n4; Jul-Aug., 2008), "Discrepancies in the radiocarbon dating area of the Turin shroud;" b. Los Alamos National Laboratory findings (Ohio State Shroud of Turin Conference report (Aug.; 2008); c. Thermochimica Acta (Vol. 425, 2005) and d. Georgia Institute of Technology chemist John L. Brown. They cited that the 1988 sample contained some re-weaved material from the medieval period and the 1532 fire incident wasn’t accounted for (added carbon to the cloth). The 2005 study, Thermochimica Acta, found the shroud could be 3,000 years old. The reason? Flax fibers (from which the shroud is made) contain a chemical component called Vanillin. As the flax ages, the Vanillin content decreases at a calculated rate. A medieval-age cloth should have 37% Vanillin left. The Shroud has NO Vanillin – indicating that it is 1500-3000 years old. The Dead Sea scrolls have no vanillin. The radiocarbon samples sent to the 3 universities in the 1988 study had Vanillin, therefore they were faulty samples. The Shroud is indeed ancient and could be the actual burial cloth of Jesus.
10. QUESTION: HOW DID THE IMAGE GET ON THE SHROUD? Di Lazzaro and his colleagues at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) conducted 5 years of experiments, using lasers to train short bursts of ultraviolet light on raw linen, in an effort to simulate the image’s coloration. They found that the ultraviolet light necessary to do so “exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today.” It would require “pulses having durations shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and intensities on the order of several billion watts.” If the most advanced technologies available in the 21st century could not produce a facsimile of the shroud image, he reasons, how could it have been executed by a medieval forger?
SUMMARY. We believe the radiation thesis suggests that a “divine light” in the tomb – God’s resurrection power – emanated from the crucified form of Jesus Christ onto the shroud. Thus God gave us a photograph of His Son, long before the technology of photography existed. Praise God for His wonderful love for us!
